


Tiles

by karatezla



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Gen, Spoilers - Entry #83
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 07:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1295977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karatezla/pseuds/karatezla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim never liked hospitals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tiles

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Entry #83](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/39676) by Marble Hornets. 



> Entry #83 was amazing and in no way am I trying to top what it was, but I've always wanted to try writing short novelization-type works of the entries and this one in particular struck me as having huge potential with prose. I experimented a little bit with form to mimic the content and symbolism and was really happy with how it turned out so I thought I'd post it.
> 
> Buku spoilers ahead for Entry #83, because it is basically Entry #83 with me dipping into Tim's head.

Tim never liked hospitals.

He had been in too many, seen too many white walls and white coats and little white pills. They smelled like clean metal and antiseptic. They tasted like dry cotton swabs. They made him uneasy, but he clung to them. The white sterility. Outside of his missing memories, the hospital was the one constant, the doctor the one familiar face apart from his own mother.

The smooth tiles of the abandoned school building reminded him of the tiles in the hallway of his ward. He remembered touching them as the doctor walked him down the hall—smooth, just off-white with crisp dregs of grout between.

He tried not to cough but it came naturally, and he climbed the stairs using his hands.

At the top of the flight was the chair. It was an ugly, marbled brown, like the padded folding table his parents had from the early 80s with the circle melted into the plastic where his dad had put down a hot pan without thinking. It didn’t remind him of home, though, only Jay. Jay was why he was here. The pang of sorrow, still raw in his throat, stopped the coughing for a moment. He rested against the wall but refused to sit.

Before long, he was coughing again. God, that cough. He might as well just start screaming at the top of his lungs. At least screaming would give him some sort of control.

The hall at the very top of the stairs was empty, lit at both ends by stretches of windows. The first classroom on his right was oddly familiar as he stumbled to the doorway, taking a few uneasy steps toward the middle of the room.

The scuffle of feet and chalkboards and chalkboards and tables. A carpet rolled up on the floor. And coughing. For a moment Tim wanted to make it to the table at the back—the one that the hooded figure had been doubled over when Jay found him—but he didn’t make it. The carpet was rolled up on the floor and now he was too, slapping the cold, dark surface with his hands, touching it with his forehead.

Everything was hot and the floor was cold and it felt good. He wasn’t sick like other people got sick. He had known that for a long time. The fever didn’t ache like the flu and the cough wasn’t itchy in his throat; both were deeper inside him than that. There was something in his lungs that rattled around like dislodged gears or nails or screws. Something inside him was wrong and whenever the coughing started he could feel it. It made him less—taking away his thoughts and memories and control until he was nothing. All he wanted was to get it out, _get it out_ , but all that wound up on the floor was blood.

His chest burned with each breath but the blood had covered his throat and was sharp enough in his mouth to clear his head. Before he knew it he was back in the hall, hand feeling along the cold, off-white tiles. There was noise there, and it took Tim a second to realize it wasn’t his own feet but someone else’s.

“Jay?”

It couldn’t be. His feet were already moving, faster.

Tim pushed himself toward the windows at the opposite end of the hallway. Jay didn’t have his camera—how would they know what happened if Jay couldn’t remember? Maybe he had found a camera. He felt the pang of sorrow renew itself. The last time he had left Jay alone the hooded man had brought him a camera. He had used the knife Tim used to cut up an apple in the kitchen the day before to free Jay and then he had backed out of the house and disappeared.

Jay wasn’t meant to be alone. The hooded man was not to be trusted.

The thought that Jay might be alive and coming to him pushed Tim down the hall. “Jay,” he said, his voice clear. The footsteps continued and they covered the pang like a salve. Each step echoed Tim’s voice—Jay, Jay, Jay, Jay, _Jay_.

A figure appeared in front of the windows.

And then the cough.

He had to stop. Tears welled up in Tim’s eyes as he sank back to the dark floor. The figure was walking toward him but he couldn’t see any features, any face. There was nothing familiar about the way it walked. It said nothing.

“No,” he managed between heavy gasps and then no other words would come, just a ragged hitching in his chest that could have easily become a sob.

Rattling, like a snake in a corner.

Tim lashed out, but the rattling stopped with a snap and he collapsed back to the floor.

The hooded figure had something for him, and it wasn’t the pills. God, why.

He needed the pills. He knew vaguely how the pills worked. It took about ten minutes for them to kick in completely, but even when he swallowed them dry, they were magic. They were water on the fire, the blinding light that chased away the dark. The convulsions within him would peter out and he would wait to feel whole again.

If he didn’t get the pills, though—

The mask hit the floor in front of him. His mask, white and perfect. It was the face he wore when there was nothing left.

He could feel himself drawn to it like he was drawn to the hospital. It was horrible, but as soon as he put it to his face he knew the pain would go away. It was no pill, but he didn’t cough when he was a mask. He didn’t hurt like _this_.

But the pills were so close.

Tim put his hand on the mask, feeling its smooth plastic before pushing it away. There was something about it that ran through him like electricity, and he knew That Thing was there before he saw It. It was his crawling backward that made the hooded man turn around and then run, bolting past Tim in the direction of the stairs, the brown chair. Tim scrambled to his feet and followed, but the air became thick and bright and then

the hospital. It smelled dry and stale and the hooded man was nowhere to be seen. Tim felt his heart race and his limbs go cold. No, not now. One step back to turn and

the street from his nightmares. Solitary streetlights in a terrible, tar black night. Tim ran. It was all he could think to do even though he had nowhere to go. Go, forward, and

he was in the tunnel at Rosswood. The place where he had been taken the first time with Jay. He could still hear Jay shouting at him to _come on_ , and _run_ , but Tim was convulsing on the rust-eaten cement. He knew nothing else. This time he ran, though. There were two sets of footsteps—his and Jay’s, but they were running to the wrong end of the tunnel. It wasn’t Jay. Reality flickered around him but the crunch of gravel remained the same and Tim willed the crunch to go faster and faster until

it turned to soft dirt and wild grass and leaves and he hurdled over a log to face

the windows at the end of the hallway in the school, bright,

and the hooded figure in front of him, no longer running in the tunnel. They were grappling, but Tim didn’t know if he wanted to punch him or hang on for dear life as the world exploded into a dozen different places around them. He was angry, yes, and his lungs ached from exertion and his skin was protesting from the constant, insane ripping out of time. He wanted the pills. No, he _needed_ the pills. He had to get them, but as soon as he tried to pull away he was

back in the hospital, but it wasn’t the nice hospital with the off-white tiles. It was his room, with the blackened edges and the door missing like his parents used to do to make sure he didn’t lock himself in his room and have a seizure where they couldn’t get to him.

“Why did you bring me here?” His skin burned like it was on fire but he didn’t want to get up again. Where would he go? He didn’t want to run anymore.

“I don’t belong here, why did you bring me here?” He screamed, and then it was

the operating table,

the river,

the tunnel with a single, desperate grab at the hooded man’s mask that revealed nothing but light,

and then another light—the sun? It didn’t matter, because in a fraction of a second he was

once again in the hospital, but not his room. God, he hated the hospital. Out of breath, Tim stumbled toward the wall, where someone years ago had written _HE IS A LIAR_ in thick, black paint strokes. It didn’t look like his handwriting or any handwriting he knew, but it spoke truth against the sickly green paint. The white had been peeling off ever since they had forcibly abandoned the building after his... incident. Tim reached out to put his hands on the wall, but they fell through and he fell

down a slope of long, pale pine needles and decaying leaves. Once and then twice and then three times before he rocked to a stop on his elbows, barely having time to breathe before

it was the hospital again. “No,” Tim breathed, stumbling back. “No.”

The coughing wracked his body and he knew It was nearby. He needed the pills or It’d consume the rest of him whole.

But he couldn’t stand up straight. The peeling white paint crunched as he fell against the wall. There was a rush of air and the blackened doors opened and like in his worst nightmares, Tim felt himself being sucked toward them. He stumbled forward and forward and forward until he was plunged into the dark on the other side and he was falling. He caught himself on

the tile in his kitchen. Smooth, just off-white, with dregs of grout between. He stood, turning to the door. The mirror that hung there—the one that had come with the house and that he had assumed was for checking appearances before leaving—was obscured by black scrawl.

_YOUR FAULT_.

Tim approached the mirror, unable to see his own reflection past the writing. His ears were ringing.

_YOUR FAULT. YOUR FAULT. YOUR FAULT. YOUR_

One step back and a turn and he fell into a litter of paper. The X through the circle. The papers crunched under his hands and knees and he saw it there, too.

_YOUR FAULT._

And then he saw the proof. Jay’s limp body sat against the wood paneling of his bar and there was blood. Dark and red, it ran through Jay’s fingers and soaked his shirt and stained the white paper on his floor.

“Oh, God,” Tim muttered. My fault. “Jay.”

There was a rush of adrenaline as he imagined there might be some chance that Jay might still be alive. He could be revived. It could be fixed, right?

“Jay!”

The pang of sorrow stabbed through his throat. Jay didn’t move, but something else did.

The hooded man stood in the entryway to the kitchen. As soon as he realized Tim had seen him, he turned and ran.

“I’ll kill you!” Tim shouted, his voice echoing through the house. He chased the hooded man out the door and

into the hospital once more. His feet slapped the debris-covered floor and all Tim heard was _YOUR FAULT_. Every step accused him.

_YOUR FAULT. YOUR FAULT. YOUR FAULT._

He turned the corner and the hooded man struck him and he fell sideways onto

the floor of the school. It was cold and clean and Tim felt rage surge through him, burning through the hot in his chest and the rawness in his throat. He had told the hooded man that he was going to kill him, and he meant it. There was a lead pipe over by the wall. Tim grabbed it and felt the weight of it in his hand, measuring how hard he could swing and if it was enough to kill a man.

The hooded man was outside the window, dangling over a thirty foot drop to the old auditorium floor below. Tim had no idea why he had decided to do that, but he intended to make him stop. He had barely threatened to swing the pipe when he saw the man’s black gloves slip into the air. There was a dull echo as he hit the floor. Another echo as Tim dropped the pipe. One glance told Tim that he wasn’t moving, if he was still alive at all.

Emotion welled up in Tim but none spilled over. Confusion, rage, even a fleeting _YOUR FAULT_ filled him up as he stumbled back, but one thought prevailed.

The pills.

Tim spun and ran to the stairs, skipping down them so fast he nearly slipped. What if the body disappeared like Jay’s did? Oh, God, he needed those pills. He had lapsed from Catholicism long ago, but his mind fell back far as he pleaded with something he wasn’t even sure existed. God, please let that body be there. _I need those pills_.

Two flights of stairs and the body was still there, motionless.

He quickly knelt, searching the far pocket first. Nothing. The nearer pocket yielded better results.

First a tape, unlabeled as far as Tim could see. He didn’t care. It bounced onto the floor as he retrieved the prescription container. Two of them, small and smooth and white, he knew the routine. They tasted sweet in his mouth as he forced them back and down his throat. Swallowing hurt so much that he burst into a fit of coughing, but it didn’t last and he knew he would be free soon. Whole.

Tim looked at the body of the hooded man and realized that now was his chance to unmask him. He couldn’t be light, like in the shifting reality. There had to be a person there. He reached forward, but there was that instinctual static again. It was here. Clamoring to his feet, he ran, but the front door only led to

the hospital and

the hallway and

the hospital and

_his_ hallway, with the attic ladder stretching out toward him and a pair of legs descending and

a flash of sunlight before it turned to a streetlamp. He was alone on the cracked street with the hooded man’s body, surrounded by blackness of his nightmares. It was gone. Tim reached for the hood but

then it was all black. Tim opened his eyes. He was lying on his stomach in the middle of a field—stiff, leftover crop poked in him in the face and the sky was powdered with clouds. Mid-afternoon. How much time had passed? He waited for the next shift, but it never came. The pills must have finally kicked in, making him immune to Its powers. Propping himself up, he looked around.

Something was wrong. He felt strange—naked.

The camera.

It was lying in the dirt a stone’s throw to his right, harness and all. He wondered briefly how it got off his body and over there, but he figured the recording would tell him. He just needed to figure out where he was and get back to his computer to find out.

What had happened? He heard the pills shift in his pocket as he started moving. The noise was him, and no one else. It was comforting. No white, no dark, no static, only him. He was alone.

God, Jay.

Pushing himself up, he crawled over to the camera, fumbled with the power button and turned it off.


End file.
